Dodgeball Devblog 2

This is the second of a fortnightly update blog showing the progress being made on Dodgeball. Theres not too much to actually visually show, but there is lots of behind the scenes work going on with these new systems being implemented. I hope to start getting this update onto the development branch and then after a few weeks move it to the main one.

Character Customizer

Character Customizer

You can now customise your character with various hats which are unlockable in ranked matches. You can click on the locked hats to see how much progress you need to do to unlock them. More of these will be added as time goes on. Hats have no collision and therefore don’t affect gameplay so don’t worry about that when choosing them. I’ll be looking at expanding this functionality by maybe adding the ability to do things such as change eye colour. Stats are only updated at the end of ranked matches, so you must stay in the game till the end for it to add towards your total. Ill add more abilities to see all your stats and progress on a single menu in the future as well as others progress in your current server/lobby, but these are just ideas for the future.

Dedicated Servers

Dedicated servers will help those stuck behind NATs still and are going to be used for ranked games. You can only rank up on these official dedicated servers. A current limitation is that you cannot join as a group or party, it sorts you onto teams at random so you may or may not end up on a team with friends. I am thinking of testing it out in this way and also allowing people to choose their team when joining but including auto balance so that its fair. Servers will also have bots in and you’ll replace the bots as you join, so there will always be a game on for you to jump into while waiting for others to join. This technique ive seen used in other games and has worked quite well in games with low player counts. Because these servers need to operate by themselves with no user input there is lots of new background stuff that isn’t apparent. Most of the work in this update has gone towards this which is why there isn’t a lot to show! There still needs to be some other user moderation stuff, like the ability to vote kick, but these might not make it into the newest update.

Singleplayer

Nothing much to say about this for now but ive been putting together a simple singleplayer mode that lets you play games with/against AI in a tournament like setting where points carry over each game and this allows you to buy more AI players onto your team or advantages which you can choose before a game starts. This is just a basic sort of practice mode and isn’t really anything too special but im sort of experimenting with turning this tournament style mode into a multiplayer gamemode.

Bug Fixes

There are some bug fixes as to be expected but there are a few that still remain and are known. The big bug fixes are the servers now properly recording player numbers, as previously it wouldn’t always work as expected. A big remaining bug is one where you try to host a server, shut it down and rehost a server and it won’t work. This could be fixed in time for the next update but for the time being you have to restart your game to fix this. This will become a top priority after the dedicated servers have been released.

Sale Update

One of the problems people have been having is not seeing servers. This is not a bug and is just directly related to the player number being low so that its rare for players to be playing at the same time. To balance this there is a sale planned in the near future (around February time) which should hopefully increase player numbers and let anyone who owns the game just themselves to play the game with others online. This will happen shortly after the next update with dedicated servers so that new players will be able to play the game regardless of NAT type.

Email Update

As listed on the contact page also, there was an issue with the email hosting I was using which caused me to not receive emails. If I haven’t responded to your email I probably didn’t receive it so please send it again and ill get back to you as quick as possible, sorry about this!